By David Friedrich Strauss
This text is substantially the Fourth [German] Edition (1840) as translated by Marian Evans, Calvin Blanchard Ltd., New York, 1860. This long and detailed work (four volumes, 900 pages of printed text) was scanned and formatted from the 1876 edition. A number of editorial changes were made:
To simplify the scanning, I elected to omit all of Strauss's extensive footnotes. (Even so, the scanned e-text held many orthographical errors, probably not all of which have been noted and corrected. In particular, my OCR software failed dismally to cope with the tiny Greek font in the 1876 text.) It is possible that a complete e-text of this work, with footnotes, may soon appear on the WWW. Meanwhile, this version will enable students to read the main lines of Strauss' reasoning. Since doing this editing, I have discovered a full e-text of this book (complete with footnotes, and all of the Greek phrases) at Peter Kirby's website www.earlychristianwritings.com.
Many texts cited in Greek have here simply been given in their English equivalent. Where context demands that the word or phrase be given in Greek, I typed it in afresh.
To make the work more accessible, I have lightly modernized Evans' translation. Verb-forms in particular are given in modern style. I have also broken up some of Strauss' very long paragraphs into to, or sometimes three paragraphs. Where Evans translates Geschichte throughout as "history" I have often substituted "story" wherever the context suggested this meaning. In a number of other minor points, this version attempts to put Strauss' meaning into contemporary English.
The page numbering of the original ET is here set in a smaller, superscripted font within curly brackets, so: {P.##}. The numbered sequence of all 152 sections (each marked with �) is made continuous, throughout the 3 volumes, for easier reference.
(Patrick Rogers).
David Friedrich Strauss
Strauss was a major voice in prompting and articulating the scholarly, detailed study of the historical Jesus, which has gone on for more than a century and a half since the publication of his seminal work Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus Critically Examined) in 1836. Many of the points he makes in this work are still part of the ongoing Jesus-of-history debate. The intense attention he paid to the actual Gospel texts is a model of studiousness.
In the course of his long (3-chapters) and mainly sympathetic assessment of Strauss' life and work, Albert Schweitzer describes him as "not the greatest, nor the deepest, of theologians, but the most absolutely sincere." Regarding Strauss' general world-view, Peter Hodgson characterises him as "the first of the modern unhappy lovers of Christian theology... not quite atheist, but unable to believe in a personal God who intervenes in the course of nature and history..." (introduction to the 1973 re-edition of Strauss's Life of Jesus, p. xv).
In place of orthodox theism, Strauss posited a pantheism that asserted the ultimate identity of God and the world and the immanence of time and eternity. He is utterly unwilling to consider any of the miracle stories as having literally occurred, and consistently seeks a rationalist explanation for the episodes narrated by the Evangelists. Rejecting both the supernatural God-man of orthodox faith, and the idea of Jesus as a prophetic preacher imbued with eschatological imagery, Strauss wrote his destructive critique of the historicist interpretation of Jesus, intending�he says�to detach the essence of faith from the religious imagery with which it had been entangled. In effect, he created his own image of what the historical Jesus may or must have been like.
Reading Strauss allows one to better understand the thought-world from which in the early 20th century Rudolf Bultmann launched his attempt to demytholise the Gospels. While this project has prompted many imitators over the intervening generations, to Strauss must go the credit of having been the first to articulate in such detail the impossibility of reconstructing from the manifold elements in our Gospels a single, convincing and coherent picture of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. His historical scepticism set much of the agenda for Gospel scholarship in succeeding generations, especially in his native Germany, and many of the problems he highlighted still pose a challenge to interpreters today.